🎋

Tanabata Tree Emoji 🎋

What 🎋 means

A green bamboo green stem with a pair of leaves emerging from it, while a rectangular red piece of paper hangs from the paired leaves with a tiny yellow star above it.

The 🎋 Tanabata Tree emoji represents the festivities of the Japanese Star Festival, also known as Tanabata. Going by the tradition, this emoji literally signifies wishes and the act of wishing and synecdochically describes union, togetherness and love.

How and when to use it

If you're responding to a sad conversation about a temporary break a couple is taking or a complete, serious one, and you're uncertain of what to respond with, 🎋 would be a good choice. It symbolizes hope that the two would get together in the first scenario and hope that they'd find better in the latter.
Since the Tanabata tree has a wish in paper hung on it, it could also act as a wishing tree or wish tree, and you could use 🎋 in all contexts that have 'wish' in it - "I really hope and wish the best for you 🎋".
Tanabata is all about the annual union of the celestial lovers. However, maybe, 🎋 could be used in the frameworks of earthly unions (that happen once in a lifetime or every year); marriages, anniversaries, etc.
For example, "Happy 25th anniversary, you guys!! 🎋🎋 We always hope and pray that you grow more and more into each other!".

Other Names

🎋 Tree Shoot
🎋 Tanabata Tree With Hanging Ribbon
🎋 Wishing Tree
🎋 Wish Tree
🎋 Bamboo Tree
🎋 Bamboo Stem With Hanging Paper

The lowdown

Category: Activities › event
Codepoints: U+1F38B
Emoji version: Emoji 0.6
Shortcodes: :tanabata_tree:
Keywords: banner, celebration, Japanese, tanabata, tree

How it looks across platforms

Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.